In which case I don’t mean mastering as I don’t care about that stuff.
I want in to sound LOUD AND BANGY
How do I do that?
Based on what I hear, mastering today is basically killing the dynamic. I am a practical person and my shortcut to achieve this is to record my performance at + 14db without limiter.
It works!
1 Like
Yea I use ableton so can’t speak there tbf!
It sounds like this Ozone AI thing is boosting some harsh frequencies. Go into the EQ plug and pull some of those back. It might also be cutting some lows if you feel it is missing some heft.
1 Like
Practice 
The AI/mastering assistant often does this to me too. I’ve had the best luck just using it as a starting point for limiting or bandaiding compression problems and adjusting eq and balance to my own taste or reference
1 Like
I think what people are saying about Ozone is your best way to learn.
You run the mastering assistant on the most dynamic loop of the track, then listen.
If something doesn’t sound right, go to the first square in the chain, EQ, (which for me goes EQ, Exciter, then Maximizer).
Then you see if you have too much high end harshness, you go to the right side and hover your mouse over the line till a plus sign shows, and add a point. A context menu will give you a curve, and this is how much it chops off the frequency. You adjust it by the handles that are two small circles preside the point.
Raise it to make that specific frequency more sharp, or lower it to cut it down or chop it off.
And know there are limits.
So if the sound is a hi hat or some sharp horns, try to be aware before you record that you may want to lower the volume or velocity of the hit.
1 Like
Sorry. Saw you were talking about low end.
A producer named Illangelo uses MV plug-in by waves ( I think that’s the name). It adds bottom end. And ozone it’s the left side of the EQ graph.
But be careful you don’t drown it in bass. Add a point to cut the really low frequency that we never hear. It’s like 20 or 30 I think.
Now, it may clip the bass of you do too much, but that’s actually a popular technique these past couple of years in hip hop. It where bass boosted tracks come from.
I’m not an expert, but it sounds like you are like me and we both own similar plugins, so I thought I’d try to help
Compressors/limiters are the classic way to get to girth and punch.
Id try to make sure the polyend is coming into daw as hot as possible. Then it gives a compressor something to squeeze etc.
I love going with all the emulations of awesome old school studio gear. Those would be plugins trying to copy:
- LA-2A
- SSL bus compressor
- 1176 compressor
- fairchild 660/670
- Pultec EQ
- SSL and Neve 1073 channel strips
Ozone (maybe bot elements though?) has a tube eq plugin that emulates the pultec. Waves and zillions of other plugin makers have all of these. Waves of course is the most prolific.
Theres a free pultec emulation that is well loved, Ignite Amps "PTeq-X.
Also you can try all the klanghelm free plugins….tube compressor, saturation, character plugs.
I use:
-
logics built in emulations of all of these.
-
waves puigchild. Goes on sale for $25 ish all the time. The “laynes” setting is a nice subtle (but does real shit) glue compressor.
-
ik multimedia black76. Got it for free. There is a setting on that called “just better” and it is. However it does suck that most of these plugins also boost the output so its easy to think its “better” just because its louder.
THE weapon though? SSL SiX. Or any analog preamp/compressor combo i guess. This would undoubtedly make your polyend GIANT straight into the daw. But thats next level. Plug-ins are essentially emulating that anyways and like many say, i think they get you most of the way there.
PS: not a master of mastering at all.
I’m looking to get a proper mixer desk console next year to master this area. Slate and SSL have nice mixing desk consoles.
1 Like